No one said the series of racial incidents at Michigan State University last fall was anything out of the ordinary, not the shouted slurs, the racist scrawls on black students’ doors, the graffiti in the residence halls.

What was unusual was the collective outrage among the black students on campus, the town hall meeting that drew hundreds, the list of 22 demands that a black student organization presented to the administration, which were about more than ugly words and anonymous scribblings.

There was, for instance, the demand that a remedial math course be taught by professors rather than graduate students and in person rather than online, the demand for something to replace a summer bridge program for low-income, underrepresented and first-generation students that ended in 2006, the demand that MSU maintain a host of support programs targeted toward the same populations.

“It is important for the administration to realize that students of color are often plagued with lower levels of academic preparation in high school, lower socioeconomic status and lower retention rates,” the Black Student Alliance wrote.

“If Michigan State University really values diversity, then administration should do everything in its power to retain students of color.”

If MSU has done everything in its power, the numbers don’t show it. Only three out of five black students who enroll earn a degree within six years. That’s well ahead of the national average, but it’s also more than 20 percentage points behind the graduation rates of their white classmates.

It is one of the largest gaps between the graduation rates of black and white students at any public university in the country.

Graduation rates for both groups have improved over the last 15 years. The gap is still there.

“To me what that suggests is that there are some systemic problems that are going on that we have not been able to effectively address,” said Lee June, who served as the university’s vice president for student affairs and services for 16 years before stepping down last year and taking a position in the faculty.

“If you take the position when you admit students, which Michigan State does and many other institutions do, that anybody who is admitted should be able to graduate ... you have to say there’s something wrong with what we are doing at this particular institution.”

That has costs that go beyond the individual students who never get to graduation. It is a loss of talent for the state at a time when increasing the number of graduates has become an economic imperative, not to mention a poor use of the taxpayer money pays for at least a portion of those unfinished degrees.

And, if the experience of at least a few similar schools is a guide, it is not an inevitability.

Goal: No gap at all

Doug Estry is Michigan State’s vice provost for undergraduate education. The issue is nothing new to him.

“We have been working through various academic or programmatic initiatives for a long time to reduce that gap,” he said. The goal is to have no gap at all.

He pointed to outreach programs that get to students as early as junior high, week-long summer transition sessions for incoming freshman and support programs for first-generation and low-income students. That’s alongside the university’s tutoring and advising services, which MSU is in the process of extending out into the residence halls, putting staff in places where they can “better identify and work with students who may be at risk.”

“The evidence of the success of some of this lies in one statistic,” he said, the fact U.S. News & World Report places MSU’s overall graduation rate 15 percentage points higher than predicted, given its mix of incoming students.

At some level, the university’s programs have worked for Jasmin Haynes.

Most people who grow up where she did don’t go to college, much less graduate. She was raised along with an older brother and a younger sister by a single mother in Detroit. She didn’t, she said, “grow up being rich.”

But, from the time Haynes was in seventh grade, her mother made sure she spent her summers in academic enrichment programs, first one that prepared underrepresented students to apply to prep schools, then summer programs on college campuses. She was at MSU two summers in a row.

“It opened my eyes to what I needed to expect,” said Haynes, who just completed her junior year, and it allowed her to form relationships with faculty members and others who have been able to help her along the way and hold her accountable for her own success.

Not that she seems to need much external motivation. Haynes is a student who has sought out ways to engage in the life of the campus and the world beyond it. Her goals are clear in a way that many of her peers’ are not: go to graduate school in urban planning, open youth development centers in Detroit.

She learned early to take advantage of any additional help the university might offer, signing up for tutoring “even if I didn’t need it, because there might be this one thing.”

“Here at Michigan State, you have to go and find the resources,” she said. “They do not find you.”

Retention a priority

The vast majority of colleges and universities have some sort of program to bolster student retention, often many.

What distinguishes the schools that actually help all of their students succeed from those that mostly say they want to seems to be the priority placed on retention, whether the approach is comprehensive and whether it has the active support of campus leadership.

It is typical for universities to have “pockets of activity where somebody is doing a program that resides in one part of the campus and somebody else is doing some other effort that is located in another but neither is connected to a larger interconnected institutional strategy,” said Shaun Harper, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania whose work has focused on why black male students succeed in college, rather than why they don’t.

The often-cited example of a school that has made equity a priority is Florida State University, which is similar in size, selectivity and student demographics to MSU.

Its overall graduation rate is slightly lower, but the gaps are essentially nonexistent, something achieved in part through a program focused on supporting students throughout their education and addressing even the smallest stumbling blocks.

The unspoken assumption at many universities that a substantial number of first-generation and low-income students will inevitably leave before graduation isn’t correct.

“What we find, time and time again, is that, when we look at similar institutions that are serving similarly diverse student populations, some schools do better than others in graduating their students,” said Jennifer Engle, director of higher education research and policy at The Education Trust.

June said MSU has done much that’s commendable.

He also said efforts have been inconsistent, that there are proven strategies it hasn’t tried.

“The comprehensive, written down, where people are held accountable, where there are actual goals and they are reinforced does not occur here as systematically as it needs to,” he said.

Racism a barrier

In October, amid the outrage over a series of racially changed incidents, Shaina Simpson found Post-It notes on her dorm room door. She was working as an intercultural aide, employed in MSU's residence halls to help others make the transition to a more diverse environment. The notes said “aide with AIDS.” There was a racial epithet besides.

“When people experience these things themselves or when they hear about them happening to others, they worry about it,” she said, “and once you’re worried there is so much less energy that you can devote toward your studies. You’re worried about being a student second and being black first.”

The gap in graduation rates is about more than some students being poor or underprepared or the first in their family to go to college.

“While those things may partially explain these high rates of attrition and these enormous gaps in completion, they don’t bring attention to important institutional factors, like these students are still incredibly underrepresented on the campus, they have very few faculty members who are from their same race backgrounds, they encounter racism on the campus,” Harper said.

Simpson, who just became president of the Black Student Alliance, said black students’ levels of comfort could be the most important factor.

Unlike many of her peers, she went to a Catholic high school with mostly white classmates.

When she got to MSU, where black students accounted for fewer than 3,000 of the school’s 36,000 undergraduates, “this was the most black students I ever saw in my life.”

But, with time, she began to notice racial divisions and racial tensions.

“There is diversity here as far as demographics, but there is no sense of inclusion,” she said. “That was really disheartening for me. After that it was a rough transition.”

MSU can’t filter out the intolerance of the larger society, said Paulette Granberry Russell, director of its Office for Inclusion and Intercultural Initiatives. It can convey its values as an institution and encourage students to treat one another with respect.

"Are there ways that we can better inform students about MSU’s values around diversity? Yes,” she said. “Are we committed to doing that? Yes.”

Helping each other

The Black Student Alliance held a study in the week before final exams, not a protest, but community event focused on academic success.

“We have to reach out to each other a lot more,” said Silver Moore, the group’s vice president. “It’s not enough that you know what to do if the person sitting next to you and sitting next to them doesn’t know it as well.”

But MSU bears responsibility, as well, she said.

The university has pushed hard over the last few years to renovate its residence halls and restyle cafeterias, “but there hasn’t been a full-on push, ‘Let’s get these numbers up and let’s get student graduating.’ ”

“That’s crazy to me,” she said. “Who cares if I get to eat in a shiny caf if next year I might not be here to eat again?”